Art Renewal Center

In 1977 businessman Fred Ross was stopped in his tracks by a painting called Nymphs and Satyr at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. The painting was by William Bouguereau, an artist that he never read about in many years of his art history studies, except perhaps as an example of everything that was wrong with painting in the nineteenth century.



The encounter with that painting set him on the course of uncovering and celebrating other artists who he felt had been unjustly neglected in the official art histories. With that beginning, he and other experts and artists in the field founded the Art Renewal Center, a website and organization that is dedicated to raising awareness for traditional realism.

The Art Renewal Center uses several means for accomplishing this goal:

1. An online museum with over 63,000 75,000 images, many high res. The most popular artists are Bouguereau, Alma Tadema, and Gerome.

2. A list of art schools which the ARC endorses.

3. An annual Salon competition with $50,000 in cash prizes. (By the way, the deadline is March 1, so there's still time to enter this year).

4. A series of essays and philosophical statements, sometimes rather polemical, by Ross and others regarding realism and modernism.

5. A collection of original Bouguereaus that Ross has gathered and loaned for museum exhibits. He recently helped with the publication of a definitive 2-volume catalog, William Bouguereau (2 Volume Set)

6. An archive of assorted treatises contributed by readers on traditional techniques and philosophies.

7. A list of about 75 contemporary "Living Masters" who have applied for and received that designation by a panel of judges. (As of yesterday, I'm excited to announce that my work has been included in the list. You can go there and get free high res files of my work for non-commercial use.) Any artist may apply for Living Master status.

8. A set of scholarships for students pursuing classical realist training.

9 A website store for books and ARC Salon catalogs.

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Lines and Colors (first blog post) on ARC

Art Renewal Center on Wikipedia